Braille Translator

Grade 1, or uncontracted braille, maps each printed character to a single braille cell with no shorthand. It is the form used for learning braille and for spelling out words exactly, which makes it ideal for a one to one converter like this one.

Braille reuses the letter cells for a through j to write the digits 1 through 9 and 0. To signal that those cells are numbers, a number sign cell is placed in front of the run of digits, and the number mode ends at the next space or non-digit cell.

An uppercase letter is written as a capital sign cell followed by the lowercase letter cell. The translator adds this sign automatically when you encode, and reads it when you decode, so mixed case text converts to braille and back without losing capitals.

The translator handles the common marks period, comma, question mark, exclamation mark, semicolon, colon, apostrophe and hyphen using their standard braille cells. Characters without a mapping are passed through unchanged so nothing is lost.

Public signage often uses Grade 2 braille, which adds contractions for common words and letter groups to save space. This tool uses Grade 1, so it spells everything out and does not apply those contractions, which keeps the conversion exact and reversible.